Showing results by narrator "Karissa Vacker" in All Categories

Best friends Syd, Rain, and Brie grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in the stifling California desert, desperately wishing for a way out. In the end, each of them will escape—but not in the way they expect. One will do it by dying, another by lying, a third by taking the fall. A deadly fire is set two weeks before the end of their senior year of high school and nothing will ever be the same.

Big hats, big trucks, big oil fortunes — Texas clichés all. And while those elements do flourish throughout Texas, they alone hardly define the place. The Lone Star State is and has always been a great melting pot, home to sprawling cities, trailblazing innovators, and treasured traditions from all over, many of which become ingrained in popular culture and intertwined with the American ideal.

Wealthy, New York City girl Claire Lindell wasn't looking for a Christmas miracle or happiness when she abruptly decided to hole up for the holiday at her godmother's cottage in a little Yorkshire village, and lick her wounds, from a near disastrous romantic decision. After her car skids into a snow bank, Claire may have accidently found her perfect Christmas and the family and love she's craved, when she offers Noah Bradford of Ayesgill Farm help to push the back end of one of his sheep out of the icy mud, even if she's going to ruin a brand new pair of Prada boots during the rescue.

Attorney Nick McGuire wasn't meant to be a family man. His career has always been his focus, and after taking time out to help his mother, he's ready to get back to the city...until Mia and her daughters arrive at Firefly Lake. Mia is beautiful and intriguing, and it doesn't take long to realize being "just friends" will never be enough. As the summer nights turn colder, Nick will have to choose between the life he's always wanted...and the woman he can't live without.

From the best-selling authors of The Hell with Love, a fierce, funny, touching collection that takes the sting out of "aging while female".

San Francisco, 1900. The Gilded Age. A fantastic time to be alive for lots of people...but not 13-year-old Lizzie Kennedy, stuck at Miss Barstow's snobby school for girls. Lizzie's secret passion is science, an unsuitable subject for finishing-school girls. Lizzie lives to go on house calls with her physician father. On those visits to his patients, she discovers a hidden dark side of the city - a side that's full of secrets, rats, and rumors of the plague.

Charlotte Gibbs wants nothing more than to put the past behind her, once and for all. But now that she's back at Firefly Lake to sell her mother's cottage, the overwhelming flood of memories reminds her of what she's been missing. Sun-drenched days. Late-night kisses that still shake her to the core. The gentle breeze off the lake, the scent of pine in the air, and the promise of Sean's touch on her skin.... True, she got her dream job traveling the world. But at what cost?

Jacs, an inventor’s apprentice from the Lower Realm, has only ever dreamed of what the land among the clouds holds. That is until she finds a letter from Connor, an Upperite boy hoping to learn more about the land below. Little does Jacs know, Connor is actually Prince Cornelius of the Queendom of Frea. With wooden boats and hot air balloons, the two begin a secret correspondence. But their friendship is divided by a heavily-guarded bridge and an inescapable prejudice.

When Ava Barnes’s boyfriend, Justin, proposes after a whirlwind romance, the young couple embarks on a quest that will test their love. For generations, engaged couples in Ava’s family have traveled into the Everglades to retrieve the egg of the magnificent frigate bird in order to bake it into a marriage cake. Those who succeed live happily ever after, while those who fail are destined for heartbreak. With Ava’s beloved grandmother gravely ill, never has the marriage tradition meant so much. 

In the wake of the devastating destruction of the luxury yacht Persephone, just three souls remain to tell its story - and two of them are lying. Only Frances Mace knows the terrifying truth, and she'll stop at nothing to avenge the murders of everyone she held dear. Even if it means taking down the boy she loves and possibly losing herself in the process.

Is it asking too much to live a typical 12th grade existence? Kelsey Kendler just wants to earn some money for university, hang out with friends, maybe even snag a boyfriend. But her pill-popping mom and distant dad scare off anybody she tries to bring home, making those last two things feel impossible.

Nora November is alive—but she wasn't always. She was once clinically dead, having spent several minutes under water after a terrible surfing accident she doesn't remember. What she does remember from her time in a coma is her grandfather, who passed away over a year ago. And a beautiful garden. And the most delicious tomato she ever tasted. Now that she's awake again her life has been cleaved in two. In the Before, Nora lived like a ghost, drowning under the weight of her parents' expectations. In the After, she's determined to accomplish the things she left undone before she died.

Ren loves and hates Etta, her best friend since they met at NYU nearly a decade ago. Etta defines Ren's New York. She lavishes her with designer hand-me-downs and takes her along to parties at trust fund lofts and Hamptons estates. But when Etta moves to Barcelona with no warning, Ren is left to face who she is without her, her unremarkable life of shoebox apartment, thankless job, and estranged family.

When Jackie is twenty-one, she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a dinner party in Georgetown. She is dreaming of France, of a life of freedom and adventure. She has won an internship at Vogue, and she thinks Kennedy is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.” And yet there is his intelligence, his humor and drive, and the chemistry between them. He pursues her, then disappears, then pursues her again in a pattern of intimacy and distance.

When nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke crash lands her biplane on the only street in No Name, New Mexico, her arrival changes her life and the lives of everyone around her. As Katie and her craft need repair, locals take her in and help her, including a schoolteacher who longs for Katie's friendship, an interracial couple who own the town's diner, a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee, and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I.

Jordan Edelman’s messy dating days are over. After a few too many broken hearts, and a father who worries a bit too much, she’s sworn off boys—at least for the summer. And since she’ll be tagging along on her father’s research trip to Nantucket, she doesn’t think it’ll be too hard to stick to her resolution. But hooking up with the cute boy on the ferry doesn’t count, right? At least, not until that cute boy turns out to be Ethan Barbanel. As in, her father’s longtime research assistant Ethan Barbanel, the boy Jordan has hated from afar for years.

This book spotlights female scientist Temple Grandin, whose experience being on the autism spectrum has informed her advocacy and her work as an animal behaviorist. Temple Grandin's pride in being different and how it shaped her world is celebrated in this biography.

Sixty-four-year-old Joe has known violence his entire life. For forty years, he’s worked as an enforcer for loan shark and close friend Maxie Smith, breaking more than a few bones along the way. When Maxie abruptly fires him, Joe isn’t sure where to lay the blame—on Maxie, the man he once considered his brother, or on the early-onset Alzheimer’s that made Maxie lose faith in him in the first place. To keep his head above water, he begins to operate a food truck that’s barely getting by. Desperate to regain some purpose in his life, Joe makes a life-altering decision.

Cousins Tabby and Ellie Mae are due for a change. Running their aunt’s beachfront bed-and-breakfast in Sandcastle, Texas, is just the thing to shake things up…though their lives spin out of control in more ways than one when a hurricane barrels into the coastline. It’s a miracle it didn’t carry them off to Kansas. Not so lucky are the assisted-living center and a small eclectic group of local folks who take shelter with the cousins.

It's the mid-1950s and Margot Thornsen is growing up between a Park Avenue apartment in New York and her family's sumptuous Oyster Bay estate as the presumed heir to her late grandfather's steel fortune. Her domineering mother has charted a course for her-to forego education and marry well-but Margot is more interested in microscopes and beetles and books. When a devastating fire brings the family legacy crashing down and the sexual revolution dawns, a new path opens up.